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Introducing Sci\ART Colour Analyst and Trainer Terry Wildfong

May 12, 2013 by Christine Scaman · Leave a Comment 

Today, it is my sincere pleasure to introduce you to Terry Wildfong. Four years ago, my family drove to Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Easter time, for me to be trained by Terry as a colour analyst. All five of us trooped into her home to be colour analyzed as part of my training. Though Terry doesn’t recall this, I remember her walking down the line looking at everyone’s colouring and quietly pronouncing, “We might have a couple of True Seasons here.”  We had three.

With events in each of our lives, we disconnected for a few years. Last August, I bought a grey backdrop from her, which rekindled the conversation. We see each other often now as we select the colours of the drapes for our students. All of us can look back on our lives and mark certain great blessings that crossed our path. Terry is certainly among mine, and today, the dearest of friends. She is one of the kindest, most giving people that I have the privilege of having in my life. Terry also has the most intelligent, accurate, and discerning colour eye that I know.

Terry sees clients for colour analysis and trains students as colour analysts in the Sci\ART system. You can learn more about her services and contact her through her beautiful website at Your Natural Design.

 

 

I have always been interested in color. Looking back, I now see the progression of events that brought me to where I am today.

In 1983, I had my colors done by Color Me Beautiful and became very curious about the differences in seasons. Also, my love for working with makeup, lead me to join Mary Kay Cosmetics as a beauty consultant in 1993. During the next two years, I gained confidence in myself and honed my cosmetic application skills. I was then ready for the next obvious step and studied with Color Me a Season and became an analyst. Color analysis and cosmetics went hand-in-hand. I had the best of both worlds. I’d found my calling so to speak. Having the color knowledge, I started teaching my sister Mary Kay consultants about color, the differences in foundation colors, and how to achieve a natural look with the glamour products, and many other workshops.

In 2004, I found Kathryn Kalisz’s  website at Sci\ART. After reading her book, “Understanding Your Color,” I realized that this was the piece that had been missing in the traditional four-seasonal color analysis approach. I was excited about learning something new. So I attended Sci\ART’s workshops, and worked with Kathryn during those visits. While there, she mentioned that she was overwhelmed with creating product and that she needed help teaching. I jumped at the chance and studied with her in 2006 and became her first certified instructor.

I had many happy years doing PCA appointments and teaching. Again, I had the best of both worlds. After Kathryn’s untimely death in 2010, I retired from the color business a year later. But it has left a large void in my life. I enjoyed meeting with clients and helping them understand and learn how to use their colors and teaching students the art of color analysis.

Recently, in working with my former student, Christine, I have a renewed excitement of the business. I now realize that I need to be a part of continuing Kathryn’s work and am meeting new clients and teaching new students.

Colorfully yours,

Terry Wildfong

—–

 

PCA Training Course Update

January 9, 2013 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments 

Many have been asking for information about the upcoming Colour Analysis Training Course. Here is what I have so far:

The Training Guide

…is not printed yet. Won’t be too long.

This is a technical document. You are 100% certain NOT to know your Season or anyone else’s after reading it even if you own the Sci\ART coloured drapes. Your odds of telling Season are higher from my other book, Return to Your Natural Colours (RTYNC), over there in the right column. A live colour analysis contains far too much sensory information to be written down. For some of it, there are no words, only feelings. Like surgery, instruction manuals only get you so far. You have to be shown a few times until you can figure it out on your own.

Little or nothing is included regarding personality or clothing styles. Also, besides speculation, there is no information about colour mixing, which isn’t my field. And it need not be yours. Doctors couldn’t go into the lab and formulate your medications but they sure do know how to use them.

The book will be presented in a binder so that updates can be printed as single pages and mailed to all those who have taken the course.

Some may be disappointed (and some delighted) that I didn’t write a simple manual that presents the discipline as it would be applied by anyone using or teaching the Sci\ART colour system, meaning a distillation of the non-negotiable standards that Kathryn Kalisz, the founder of Sci\ART, would have insisted on. I couldn’t do it.

First, I doubt that a consensus would be easy, or possible, to arrive at. It would take a year. I’m not very good with delays.

Second, and I think the biggest challenge we will face if, one day, we can form a Sci\ART-based collaborative, is that even Sci\ART analysts trained by Sci\ART trainers don’t concur on method and decision-making. Women are still being told they’re three different Seasons. That’s a problem for another day.

Third, I always have to tell a story for some reason. If I’d written a How To guide, I’d feel like I’d taught half the course, or only engaged half of your brain, the left side. That’s not at all how I see colour analysis, or anything else, for that matter. It wouldn’t be my course at that point. I wouldn’t be singing from my heart.

 

 

This manual does not repeat or resemble Kathryn’s Understanding Your Color. I am hoping that text is and will continue to be available from Suzanna Greif at orders@spectrafiles.com. I have not been able to contact Suzie, so I cannot say at this time. Kathryn’s book remains essential, perhaps a springboard for mine.

Don’t compare these two training guides to RTYNC or to each other. Apples to oranges. They were written for different audiences to be used in completely different contexts for altogether different purposes. Such comparisons have no relevance.

The Guide will not be for sale to the public for at least 6 months after the Training Course is first offered. It will cost $80 to buy. I’m not quite sure when it will be for sale. The thing is, it’s of very little use to you unless you take the course. You won’t be missing anything regarding what you know about your Season or Tone.

 

 

The Course Schedule

The Course Schedule isn’t posted because each session will require flexibility, given the private schedules of draping subjects. We will drape a minimum of 6 assorted people, including the course participants. We will spend sufficient time on theory and practical exercises involving the Munsell colour system, but our focus will be draping.

Prior to arriving, I ask that you have read through the Training Guide that will be mailed to you with your deposit, as well as my previous book, Return to Your Natural Colours. I hope that both are self-explanatory enough to save us some time in the classroom so we can move on to the practical applications quickly.

Please bring with you a page or two of makeup swatches on paper (anything and everything except lipgloss which quickly becomes a transparent oily stain on paper). We will look at clothing colours as well, so bring scarves and fabric if you wish.

We’ll end each day with a glass of wine or herbal tea, maybe strongly caffeinated coffee, let me know your preference, and our feet up. Bring your questions. The course will not cover personality or body lines (Kibbe and other dress styles). We will touch on makeup application, but briefly. I am happy to discuss these informally after the day’s session ends.

The course will run over 3 days, whether in Chatham or London, Ontario, depending on whether you’re coming from the Detroit or Toronto directions. I will make myself available for the 1/2 day before and after as well.

Once the course has run a couple of times, we may firm or reorganize the schedule based on student feedback.

 

 

The Certification

I have some sort of built-in requirement to be very transparent. In my usual way of overdoing everything, I’ll probably overdo this next section. Please pardon me for that, but I really want you to know what you’re getting for your investment.

As you know, the Sci\ART system of colour analysis is the one I was trained in and the one that I believe works. I never met the founder, Kathryn Kalisz, though we did speak on the phone and by email several times.  By the time I knew what the most profound questions were in colour analysis, she was gone. We never talked about her intentions or priorities for her business.

I have not taken any instruction to become a trainer in that system. The training you receive from me will not differ from what I was taught by a Certified Sci\ART trainer in terms of the analysis process or deductive reasoning that goes along with it – but by necessity, my spin will be on it.

Every ideology has a beginning and then is moulded by each mind with which it makes contact. I will teach you the Sci\ART system as I learned it, adapted only in how I implement the algorithm and application for the client. The closest to the original Sci\ART training will come from highly respected Certified Sci\ART trainers, Amelia Butler and Maytee Garza and perhaps others who are not training at the present time. I am unaware if these women are or will be teaching. You’ll have to ask them.  Amelia can be contacted via her website at www.truecolour.com.au. Maytee has relocated and the only contact information I have for her is an email at info@mycolortone.com. Her website at www.revealstyleconsultancy.com may still be active as well.

The language gets sticky. Although I can call myself a Sci\ART Analyst, having learned from a Sci\ART trainer, you won’t be able to. Your certificate will say, “has earned the designation of 12 Blueprints Colour Analyst, training based on the Sci\ART concept, adapted by Christine Scaman”, or something similar. That would be fair and true.

If anyone wonders how it’s adapted, they need only read this website. A rare few people actually invented what they teach. Attribution is important and tells everyone where you got your start and the foundation of your belief system. I don’t want to get wrapped around this axle too tight, but you ought to give it some thought and decide your position about it. If it matters to you to be a “Sci\ART Analyst”, you must see Maytee or Amelia, or another trainer if they teach once more.

The Certificate, so beautiful, I wish I had one myself, will look a lot like this. I’m happy to consider different wording if anyone has suggestions.

You can be certified under my name and current business name. The name 12 Blueprints  may have changed by then, oh, the excitement about that. Finally, I may have a name I like better, words spoken by a brilliant woman way back when I was getting started. Digression, sorry.  My own name probably carries the brand recognition and credibility anyhow. As one practical and forward-thinking woman said, “Who cares what it’s called?” If I change my business name, I’ll mail you a new certificate for free. I’m not diminishing the components, just trying to get something done and keeping the focus on the things that matter.

 

Tiger swallowtail butterfly.

 

Business and Marketing

Too many courses give you lots of knowledge and not enough information about how to turn that into a dollar. If you want to do a single PCA per month, that’s fine. My vision is to have an analyst in every city and state who earns a good living. Along with the skills to know Season, a portion of this guide (although not the in-person  course) is devoted to getting you thinking about a full time business, sharing with you what it’s taken me 4 years to learn.

In business, you know what the Value Proposition is – what you offer and how you deliver it. I believe that we need to deliver more to the client than their Tone and the swatches. Give her what she really wants. She wants better hair colour. Whatever the product, its final form has to take into account human behaviour, meaning how real people will use it. Make a study of that and then adjust the product to suit the human, just like Munsell did when he made up his colour system. You’ll offer way more value.

For my own clients, the VP is incomplete till she feels guided and empowered, makes better makeup decisions on her own in stores, and has acquired discernment skills regarding the wrong voices that once influenced her. You must choose your own stand on this. The guide contains a section about transferring your VP to your clients in process, support, and professional attitude.

As an instructor, my VP to you is not to pronounce your clients’ Season. That’s not what you want, or not most of you. My assumptions are that you want:

• to be an accurate and excellent colour analyst,
• practicing a skill that you love with passion,
• with the freedom that earning an income will bring to the rest of your life.

I want you to leave me with the horsepower it takes to get reach altitude fast and start earning. The business section in the guide includes appendices to get you one beautiful, slick website along with installation and support for little time or financial cost, contact names for key partners, and the shopping lists you’ll need to open your doors in two weeks. Start thinking of a business name and where you’re going to buy your makeup collection.

 

Emerald swallowtail butterfly.

 

The Cost

The introductory cost for the 3 days is $3000CDN. That price is not guaranteed for any date or period of time. Email me if you are ready to make a commitment and we’ll talk. The price includes the Training Guide, the 12 Season Cycle on cardboard and as a laminated page, and a flowchart of the draping process as a laminated sheet, along with the training.

A non-refundable deposit of $250 is required. The Training Guide will be mailed to you for study when the deposit is received in the PayPal account. The entire amount of the course must be received prior to taking the course.

Should a circumstance in your life require a cancelation, I will refund 90% of the fee up, but only 80% of the fee in the 72 hours prior to the beginning date and time of the course.

Should a cancelation be required because of a circumstance in my life, I will refund 100% of the fee, as well as $150 of the deposit (the remaining $100 of the deposit will cover the Training Guide and shipping fees).

Should a cancelation occur because of weather and flight delays, I will refund 90% of the fee at any time and let you decide about the $150 of the deposit, in case you wish to take the course again in the future. Payments will move through the PayPal account at 12blueprints@gmail.com.

I can consider taking Visa but hundreds of people seemed to do very well with PayPal when they bought RTYNC. This is far better for you than exposing vendors like me to your credit info, especially since you won’t be making repeat purchases from my business. PayPal allows you to buy a wide, wide variety of products and services on the internet.

To give you some real comparison, I took the Sci\ART course in April 2009. The training cost 2200 US plus travel expenses. The drapes were 3800 CDN for the full set, excluding Tonal Blacks and the Wedding drapes. Lamps, cosmetics, wall paint, a client chair, mirror, shelving, desk, and so on, all had to be bought.  I spent 5K of my own and borrowed 5K that was repaid in a most casual fashion within three years. You can’t be in business for yourself from household expenses.

You can’t be in business for yourself for less than 10K in today’s world – and this does not include the add-ons that can wait, like Luxury Drapes, extended makeup collections, and other non-essential items that you integrate over time. But you certainly can be in business for yourself. This is still way cheaper than 6 months to 3 years at a community college and then the process of job applications and interviews.

The motor on the PCA engine is revving much higher now in the public awareness than it was back then, so I hope you’ll progress faster than I have. I cannot speak for other analysts regarding how many bookings they have. A lot depends on how willing and able you are to move locations – and if you are, you can be booked to the point of exhaustion. I see between 6 and 10 clients each month, but I reserve time for other things (another job, writing, and three teenagers). There are full-time analysts in the US who see 20 to 30 clients per month. Till you get your feet on very solid ground, which takes 4-6-9 months, three appointments per week are plenty to allow you time to think, build, and grow. The job takes emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental stamina.

 

Black swallowtail butterfly.

 

The Travel

The course will take place either in Chatham or London, Ontario. Elsewhere? No idea yet. A work permit in the US takes about 6 months, an immigration lawyer tells me, and without one, you can be barred for 5 years. Not risking that. I adore the US.

Chatham is less than one hour from the US border at Detroit-Windsor. It is about 1hr 15min from the Detroit Airport excluding border crossing time, which may take 15- 45 minutes depending on the lineup. The hotel will be the Comfort Inn on Richmond St. Room rates are $88 (upstairs, 2 stories, no elevator) or $93 downstairs. Check in time is 2 PM, check out at 11 AM. Cancelations are accepted at no penalty before 4PM the day before. If due to weather, the policy is much more free, though I’ll let the staff make those arrangements with you when you book your room. Local phone number is  519-352-5500. Tell Lisa or Brooke on the front desk that you’re reserving with this course.

The drive from Chatham to London is 1 hour, so 2hr 15min from the Detroit aiport. From the Pearson Airport in Toronto, the drive to London is 2 hours. The hotel is the Travelodge at 800 Exeter Road. Room rates are about $70 per night. Local phone number is 519-681-1200. Nicole on the front desk ranks in the top 5 of most helpful staff I’ve ever met anywhere.

You are more likely to need a car in Chatham than London, though really, you don’t need a car. You’ll stay in the hotel where the course will run. There are two restaurants within a 10 minute walk and taxis for about $10. It’s a small town.

In Chatham, winter weather is the same as Detroit. London and Toronto can be the Great White North that you hear about, but they’re still pretty tame most of the time.

A minibus exists (www.robertq.com) from both airports to both cities. It will take you across the border at Detroit-Windsor. In Chatham, it stops at a truck stop that is 5 minutes from the hotel. In London, it stops across the street from the hotel.

Consider arriving early and leaving late in case of weather, time overflow, etc. I will plan to be available for 4 days (1/2 day before and after), though the course will be formally complete in 3 days.

 

 

The Dates

Given enough notice, we can be quite flexible and I’m happy to work around your availability. Monday-Wednesday or Tues. – Thurs. seems reasonable, but weekends are manageable as well. I hope to offer the first session in late Feb. or sometime in March.

 

Anything else you might like to know?

 

—–

Can Eye, Hair, and Skin Colours Conflict?

November 7, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 32 Comments 

Answer: No. Never. They can appear to conflict until your colours are correctly analyzed.

I get 3 or 4 emails each month about this. So let’s talk about it, framed around pieces of conversations with real women. It’s the practical application of my digression in the earlier post, How To Match Foundation.

Palette and swatch in this post always refer to colours found within your particular group of colours in the 12 Tone system of colour analysis developed by Kathryn Kalisz. Some of the Tones or Seasons may have similar or identical names with other companies but if their origin isn’t Sci\ART, their colour collections are different. I don’t know how other organizations developed their palettes, what their colours are, or what the desired outcome of their PCA process is. It’s not my place to answer questions about them.

The eye photos in this post are just lovely pictures. They are not textbook examples of the words or the ideas.

 

 

If hair/eye colours are not in the palette

I am a Bright Spring with dark brown eyes, dark brown hair, and light skin.

Yes, Spring under Winter influence is often brown eyed, from a glowy topaz jewel yellow to black brown. Many persons of Asian and Celtic origin have this colouring of darkness in hair and eyes and lightness and brightness in skin.

Since this is predominantly Spring, not Winter, the person is sometimes not conspicuously contrasting, though they certainly can be. A brown eye with light skin or hair is fairly contrasting in itself. Sometimes, the Bright Spring eye is so light brown that it’s yellow, like a wolf. It’s quite a thing to see. Or to be, I would think.

It’s this,

 

 

not this, but notice the coat colours and the eye-coat harmony, animals are just like us,

 

 

 

The color of my veins, lips, and cheeks are all in my color swatches and flatter me.  However, the brown in my eyes and my hair is not in my color swatches and does not flatter me when I wear clothes of that color.  How can I wear brown as an eye and hair color but not anywhere else without looking washed out?

You’re wearing the colour you think you see, which is never what colour is. Here is one reason for why it’s harder to figure for some Tones.

There is variation in hair and eye colour in most Seasons, but nowhere more than True Winter and the Brights. I’m not sure of the answer from a genetic perspective. I don’t think anyone can answer the magic of how harmony happens in spite what our eyes think they see. Maybe the mysteries should remain mysteries.

The way I reason it is that we don’t know the exact pigments that make up our hair and eyes.  If I showed you 20 brown eyes, could you pick out your own? Would you pick the same brown as your friends would choose? Would you pick the same browns, yellows, oranges, and other colours, that the drapes (consistent with the Sci\ART colour calibrations) identify within your colouring? Probably not, on any count. We do not know which colours make up our final colours until one is draped. If you knew and wore the ingredients that go into your total hair and eye colours, you’d be utterly flattered.

Bright Spring has many yellows, beer and clear cider colours. When they have dark hair, it’s usually root beer and black tea. It is never coffee, which only looks heavy and thick on a colouring that is as far from those as you can get. Lighter brown hair is herbal tea, not orangey-muted-gold, not velvety-dense-brown. It might look ash brown or medium brown but it isn’t.  It is clear. While clear means high chroma, and transparency is not a quality by which we define colour (because colour can be bright or soft and still see-through), this hair is like coloured cellophane.

 

 

People with green, blue and grey eyes seem to always look great if they match their clothes to their irises.

I would not agree. Blue eyes will match blue drapes or blue clothes in any Season but the best match is only in one. It’s not even a difficult decision. Some aspects of a correct analysis are challenging for a woman to perceive on herself. Achieving the ultimate eye colour is usually easy.

The colour a woman has matched to her eyes all her life is never the best or correct one in my experience. She needs her Colour Book to direct her to her turquoise and only then will her eyes become all they could be. I see women hope they’re wearing their eye colour all the time and most cases, they’re barely in the ballpark.

Blue eyes under Spring influence (one of the 5 possible Seasons) are seldom blue. They’re turquoise, aqua, or cornflower (light blue with very little green, the cornflower being one of the few truly blue flowers, but to me, appears a little violet). It’s a beautiful thing when you find it.

 

 

Not just me but a lot of brown-eyed people can’t wear brown.

Quite right, many brown eyed people are Winters of some sort and have very little brown in their palette. And when they’re draped, darned if much of the brown in the eyes suddenly turns black and then they’re wearing their real eye colour at last.

Hair and eye colours as they appear are often not in the True Winter, Bright Winter, and Bright Spring palettes.  I think the way it works is that the contributing base pigments are there but the mix isn’t.

You could say to me, “OK then, if I could take colours from my palette and mix them, are you saying that I could theoretically make my hair and eye colour from the swatches? ”

I think so but the truth is that I don’t know for sure if any and every mixture would still guarantee that the hue/value/chroma remain constant. If you mixed complements, you would mute the colour if either of the originals contained the complement of the other. You’d mute the resulting colour into a more muted Season.

To make clear green (say, Winter), you need a blue and a yellow without red, I would think. Could it be done? Winter colours contain red, but are there a blue and a yellow without red? I’m not enough of a colour mixer to know.

Thinking out loud now…To make clear orange (Spring), you’d need a red and a yellow that contain no blue. That seems possible, Spring colours are not blue-based, though some contain blue.

Clear violet – needs a blue that leans red and a red with some blue in it, neither of which contain the complement of violet, yellow. That could make a brilliantly clear violet, even a violent violet, if it’s necessary – sure it is, for Winters. How is that done for Spring where yellow appears in every colour? Haven’t figured that out yet.

Can I make amber or warm brown eyes with a True Winter palette? I think so. True Winter contains yellow, very saturated, a little blue without turning it green. It also contains the other primaries of red and blue. Three primaries make brown.

True Winter and the Bright Tones are intricate and unique types of colouring. Not inconsistent, just complex. Which is why I suggest they think twice before colouring their hair. I have never seen it be improved enough to balance the cost, time, and upkeep.

 

 

I can match clothes to the rim around my iris (which is sort of a dark periwinkle) and it is quite flattering but if I wear clothes that are the same brown as my irises I look washed out.

So it’s not the right brown that you’re wearing, it’s just the one you think you see as the amalgamation of all the many colours in your iris. Good call to notice that the rim of the iris is different and if you can match it, a superlative colour on every person.

 

 How can brown-eyed people can be any Season, but only Autumns can look great wearing brown clothes and makeup? 

There are a million versions of brown eyes. Brown eyes can be in any Season, but they won’t all be the same brown. Same with the 12 Tone palettes. Many Tones have brown choices but they’re not the same brown.

Nine in ten women only find out their real eye colour when they are draped. Those brown-eyed people you refer to in your question and the browns that you refer to looking great on Autumns… very unlikely the same brown.

 

 

 

Are cool hair and warm skin possible?

I was snow white blonde as a child, but am now a dark, ashy blonde. It’s a cool colour.

 Dark ash blonde could be found on a cool, neutral, or warm person. Apparent hair colour isn’t tightly tied to the true heat level of your colouring, though your overall contributing colours and appearance are always 100% in harmony. Every person. The true heat level of your hair is perfectly consistent with the heat level of your skin and everything else.

We could take your dark, ash brown hair and place it next to five other dark, ashy heads. It would be interesting to see whose is cool, whose warm, and whose is neutral in between cool and warm. I would guess that your hair wouldn’t be the coolest if we compared it on a scale. It might be cool-ish, but that’s not Absolute Cool.

Because you know, Absolute Cool and Absolute Warm, they’re rare in human colouring. Kind of extreme. I haven’t seen a True Autumn or True Winter in ages. I see several Neutral Season versions of Autumn and Winter every month. The thing to wrap your head around is Neutral. What does it mean? What does it look like?

Just playing the odds, you are neither warm nor cool in skin and hair. If you’re like eight or nine people in ten, why wouldn’t you be, you’re a Neutral Season that might lean towards cool.

Whatever you are, cool, warm, or somewhere in between, the setting is the same in all your features. One genetic code governs your paintbox.

 

 

 But I have medium light skin with golden undertones and no rosiness in the cheeks. All I see is yellow. Wouldn’t that be warm?

Colour analysis, which guides every colour decision you will make, isn’t about what you look like or appear to look like. Your natural colouring group, Tone, Season, is determined in the one way that can truthfully reveal it: how the colours in you react to other colours. Nobody can know their truthful colouring correctly without testing their own skin’s reactions against an organized and measured set of colours in a colour-neutral environment. If your colours react the way you expect them to, you would be that one person in 50 who knew ahead of time what was going to happen. That’s why it’s so hard to do from books and photos and impossible from verbal descriptions.

Your skin probably is light-medium. What colour your undertone is, or even whether it’s warm/cool/neutral, nobody knows till we test and measure it. Why am I so sure? Because nobody who comes to a colour analysis appointment is ever wearing their correct foundation – until we solve that question forever more and show you how to make the best choice.

 

 

If my hair is overly golden, my skin looks red. When it’s natural dark ashy color, highlighted with platinum, it looks tanned and alive. Just natural it is bland. Dark red wasn’t good. But when I went a more natural dark blonde with subtle red tones, I got many compliments. Dark golden blonde, more of a caramel, washes me out, as does all over light blonde with no contrasting darker pieces. Can someone have a seemingly warm complexion with cooler toned ash hair?

Actually it’s really common. Usual, in fact. Though there’s lots of good colour observation here, the description could occur in many of the 12 types of colouring. Sounds to me like you have cool-neutral skin with a little warmth, but placed next to wrong hair colour, it will look warmer than it really is.  You may have a false yellow overtone, like many cool Neutral Seasons, and be interpreting that as your golden undertones and yellow warmth from the previous question.

Too yellow hair does make faces red, especially True and Soft Summer, I find. But then, there’s a disconnect in your comments. Dark ash with platinum sets up big distance between lightest and darkest, which I find looks right on nobody.

On Summer, their light/dark range isn’t this wide, since it goes from pastel to mid-dark, not icy light to very dark (which is Winter). And so it follows that their best highlight is not that far from the base colour, or else they look striped and severe.

On Winter, they do have this big light/dark range but putting it in the hair is only disruptive, breaking up their force. The randomness looks messy when placed on a colour language that is very far from random. Of course, nothing applies to everybody and you can’t generalize about hair colour across an entire Tone. Some Lights are not flattered by highlights either.

3/4 of women would say their natural hair colour is bland. Not remotely true but media has taught us that it is so they could sell us hair colour. The hair industry, ay? Their biggest problem is that they think they’re fine. Many women would not attest to that – the same ones who bought $40 a bottle of wrong foundation colour. Women love their colourist most of the time. We feel real friendship and loyalty. But regarding our faith that we really are wearing our very best hair colour? Not so sure. Hair is a trend-driven industry – highlights, lowlights, we’ve never tried copper, let’s go lighter. We only have one skin colour. It is illogical that we could be flattered by five hair colours. Become the expert of your own appearance.

Until you are wearing your best clothes and makeup, your natural hair colour will not appear as beautiful and perfect as it is – so I advise women after a PCA to make one trip to the salon to get the heat level set right and come closer to their natural colour. Then leave the hair for a few weeks and work on the clothes and makeup. Your eyes need time to readjust to the real original you and to absorb how your better colours affect your apparent hair colour by making it look perfect and ideal. Then you can really see your hair colour and you can go back to the salon, hopefully only one more time, and finish the fine tuning.

Also, once a woman has had many hair colours, she and those who have seen all those colours can’t make a solid judgment any longer. There’s just too much history swirling around. Someone outside your box needs to touch the reset button. I nominate your friendly neighbourhood colour analyst.

 

 

I am at a loss as to what color to dye my hair.

I’m at a loss too till your colours are accurately analyzed. You are like 98% of the real people in the real world who seem conflicting. You’re not. Nobody is. Everyone’s colours make complete sense.

Once we have your Tone understood, every single aspect of your colouring and the colour decisions to follow are consistent and coherent. It’s not even hard. Once we know the truth, each one of us is very logical and connected in our colouring.

But. Even knowing your Tone, I still couldn’t give blanket hair colour advice that would cover every woman equally well. Everyone makes her own darkness adjustment within a Tone. Not everyone is necessarily improved by departure from her natural hair as it grows out of her head. And for nobody is this more true than the Bright Seasons.

 

 

Art and Science

Not being able to explain a thing doesn’t make it not true.

C. said it so beautifully here,

…the science of light, the discovery that it is both particle and wave and how it behaves erratically when observed. So nature is evasive and we can not reduce everything in the world around us to neat mathematical equations

….artists working in isolation through history have been representing through symbol what scientists have been discovering in the lab at the same(ish) time and not even known it. Think of the cubists and surrealists relating back to Einstein’s new world of curved space and the theory of relativity, or the complex inherent patterns in Jackson Pollocks’ work reflecting a new understanding of the complex, previously overlooked patterns in nature.

It seems artists, at least revolutionary ones, had/have a deep unconscious understanding of the stuff of the universe and represent it through symbol before we have the words or the science to explain.

All of these threads…point in the same direction. Colour theory, it seems, is not about finding the best lipstick. It is recognizing we are made of the stuff of the stars and finding our place in the universe.

 

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Lilia is a Dark Winter

October 31, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 17 Comments 

We share zodiac signs, Meyers Briggs types, and Season. How could we not have a day of the analysis and philosophy of beauty and self?

 

Here we begin. Cuteness beyond words.

 

Draping and Black

Once she had a chance to review the journey of her colour analysis, Lilia asked,

At first, we did the four drapings of black, brown, silver, and gold. We saw that black gave a severe look and was the worst followed by silver and gold which all gave something good and bad, and then brown that felt comfy but not striking.

So why in the world would I wear that black color on me if I know it was the worst on the first drapes we saw. If there is some color I should combine as a basic and then adjust to my Tone, why could it be more the brown that was the best of the four ? (from what I remember but maybe I have a bias in my memory?)

 

You’re remembering the very first drapes where the categories are still very broad. When I use those first four drapes, I am not thinking in terms of Season decisions. We were gathering information about what your skin does placed next to different colours. Only True Seasons will have definite Yes/No reactions, but they’re 1 person in 10.

We will see better and worse effects with all four of these early drapes. Dark Winter often looks comfortable in True Autumn if you ignore the yellow because they have a little muting and that type of warmth. Their eyes often connect with some Spring colour characteristics – why? Because they find and harmonize with the higher saturation.  I think in terms of “skin better with gold than yellow, eyes better with higher saturation” rather than “Winter over Summer”. All four of these first drapes can be equally success and compromise, even the one we might pick as best.

Black wasn’t Lilia’s worst. It was the best in some ways, despite too much shadowing. Summer silver grey was non-existent, diminishing of her and diminished by her. The drapes have an effect on us and we have an effect right back on them. The skin was fogged in, cloudy, yellowish, almost polluted – what Winter colours do to Summer colours when held side-by-side. Winter’s white makes Summer’s white look yellowish even though it’s not, it’s slightly blue-pink-muted. Only black cleared the smog to perfect the skin tone, removed the jaundice of Spring and Autumn, and brought definition to the features. Too much definition? Certainly, but we adjust that later on in the process.

Those first drapes represent the extremes of that pure Tone. Very few people wear them perfectly. I haven’t seen a True Winter (or True Autumn) in forever. Yes, it is a compromise to choose black as the best, but at the first drapes, everything is a compromise unless you’re a True Season. Plus, our eyes hadn’t yet learned all they were going to. They had many more comparisons to absorb. The process adjusts and adjusts. That True  Winter black is too blue-black and too shiny but there are many blacks, just like many blues, and so on. Dark Winter’s is a little warmer, a little duller. Extract some Winter blue, hold it in front of a diesel exhaust for a moment (meaning add a little Autumn gold), et voila! Dark Winter white extracts a little of True Winter’s blue and adds a drop of dark chocolate(Autumn gold).

 

 

I don’t suggest all black on anyone, even in your best black. It looks Babushka. It makes a person look older. Colour is younger without even trying. Head to toe black is outdated, an urban myth, an energy flat line. But Dark Winter can and should wear black. It is a very basic wardrobe colour on that Tone.  Some Dark Winters feel that dark brown or dark blue are more modern than black to wear with other colours and I don’t disagree at all. With black, the pendulum went too far and it’s time to center it again.

On Dark Winter, it’s only black that I don’t love best when it’s shiny. Shine exaggerates. Light gets lighter, warm seems warmer, cold, colder.  All the other colours in the Tone are equally good matte or shiny. My opinion only, Bright Winter is shinier than even Winter’s usual high shine. Dark Winter is the least super shiny.

 

That Green!

I take a lot of heat about this particular green. In the Masterpiece Drapes we show at the end of the session, there are 15 stunning colours for that Tone. About the green, every single woman says, “Are you sure?” She is uncomfortable and squirmy. She declares, “Ok, well, I’ll never own anything in this colour!” Some go out and it’s the first purchase they make (that’s usually the woman who’s given  me the most heat over it )

I still only own it as a facing on the collar of a red vest. I don’t remember it from my own PCA. But what did I know? We analyzed my family of 5 and found 3 True Seasons and  2 Neutral Seasons that were the same. Meant nothing to me. We could have been 5 Bright Springs and that would have seemed normal.

In a year, a woman owns an item from about half of her palette. She is comfortable in her more perfect makeup colours, and she pulls out the palette and thinks, “Look at that colour. Why have I never seen it before? Why do I not own anything in that colour?” And the world of you opens up a tiny bit more.

 

 

The green is important in the wholeness of you. Every one of your colours is. We get caught up wearing our six best but no landscape is complete with only that. We need our earth and bark, our bitters and sweets, to present our totality. We are a balance of our light and shadow places. The circle of life, the equilibrium that must exist. Your colours can access parts of you that you can’t reach on the day of your colour analysis. You don’t know about these levels and regions of you yet. The colours are looking further down the road of you.

There is a tendency to see these final drapes as 15 turtlenecks. They are wherever you insert them. Your eyes will capture one button on a friend’s coat. A navy coat is far more interesting with a narrow green band sewn into to the cuff or lining, or the whole lining!, than it would be as a solid navy block. The person is communicated more completely, as the multilayered individuals that we are. How amazing is it when your clothing can be that accurate about you?

 

The One and Only Magic

Lilia remarked,

Today, I wore lipstick and I just saw my lips, no harmony, just biiiiiiig lip color! I went back home and indeed it was a true winter sample. But on the palette it was good and did harmonize well! Also my coat is a navy blue, not as dark as the one in the fan but with more saturation and clearer. Funny how yesterday with a deeper blue/and black, I got complimented each time crossing someone and today, nothing. Seems true winter colors on me are awful and it makes such a difference switching from dark winter to true winter!

 

No question, it is unbelievable how the little adjustments make a giant difference in how you look and feel once your eyes and heart are sensitized to it.  If you can’t quite tell if a colour matches for saturation, look at it another way. Is it too blue? True Winter is where you may find most errors, but they’ll all be too blue.

How close your choices have to be to the swatches is something  many women wonder about. Next post: 3 Weeks After Your Colour Analysis.

 

Undertone

I wonder if colour analysts agree that we don’t meet people and work at guessing their Season before the draping begins. But subsconsciously, we analyze every person we meet – and for me, on every aspect of our interaction. True Winter will wear makeup to the appointment. I’ve only met 5 or 6 and it has not failed. They will find a way. The Lights will say, “Sheer is never sheer enough.” Dark Winter will tell me fairly early on what they don’t like. Lilia doesn’t like any version of purple, from the iced violet that is usually a favorite, to any other version. Burgundy felt much better.

She said, “I showed my PCA pictures to some people, and each time it’s Ooooooh that purple is SO beautiful on you! Dammit! As I see it, it is really a big deal because it’s the undertone.”

 

 

 

Yes, approximately what I see as the undertone of Dark Winter. As you’ll read in my book, I don’t really know what undertone is as a biological layer. Nobody ever defines it in a way that makes sense to me so I do what I always do – I make up my own version till I hear a better one. The book (RTYNC over in the right column) shows the undertones as I see them today, though for some (like Bright Winter), there were a couple of choices (not Dark Winter).

I’ve read that undertone is the colour of our different bloods. That implies structural changes to hemoglobin, doesn’t it? It’s not implausible that it could change its molecular structure enough to alter its colour without impeding its binding with oxygen. Who’s going to fund the research to prove it? What drug could be developed based on the data? Undertone is a bit of an aura feeling I get, though I’d never put that in a book. It’s like the sum total of the glow of the individual. Does that imply that I can see it before the draping? No way. My eyes need to see the reactions of your skin just as much as yours do.

Lilia: So from what I understand, I chose the only colour I hate in the world to be my very number 1 good colour.

Ok, Number 1, it’s funny.

But on a psychological level, philosopher that I am, I’m sure we have an intuition for colour. I’m sure we deeply know and recognize what’s good or not. When I see my wardrobe I can find a lot of consistency with Dark Winter. Why would I have eliminated the best colour on me ?

Christine: Yes, it is funny. And, for me, fun. I love to take you as far as possible from the woman you arrived as. I want to open every window in your mind that you will allow so you can see yourself as you never have. Your choice of words is so good, “I chose the only colour I hate…”, because you did.

Many women wonder why they have aversions to their best colour, even on a larger scale of “Why would I eliminate my entire Season?” I don’t know but I’ve talked about it or around it a lot. We lose our path. We hear other voices than our own from when we were that little face up at the top. We believe compliments to be accurate when in fact, compliments are always always emotionally invested. We don’t love who or what we are. We need permission to be our real selves. So many things.

Lilia: Is there something to fear about being beautiful?

C: Yes, I think there is. One woman said she actually felt uncomfortable being noticed for this reason. Like separating herself from the safety net of her human tribe. Like having to live up to a newer, bigger, fuller, stronger level of herself. When I pray, I don’t ask for cash or prizes. I ask for the health, happiness, and safety of those I love. And I ask that I can be enough to achieve the things I want. Could that be it? Could we feel afraid that we’re not going to be enough for what this new face communicates?

 

 

Philosopher’s Beauty

Lilia: Yesterday, I was wearing good colours. I was complimented and I felt SO awkward. That was so unusual. I didn’t expect that effect. I thought that I already had good colours in my makeup and clothes base. I felt that I just needed a few changes to put all of them together and the difference wouldn’t be that much that anyone would notice except me.

ERROR. I discovered there is a “wow” effect. There is a magical effect. (that magical effect  that I didn’t have with TW colours today). Now, I can now recognize it very well when “the magic” is here.

C: Those photos we took are striking in a visceral way. Only the exposure and saturation are raised a trace to show the true colours. Often with those last drapes and the makeup on, my heart rate speeds up. It’s very physiologic. The beauty of it makes me light-headed. My breathing patterns change because my brainwaves are altered. It’s not just me, I just have thought about it more.

Lilia: Colours are waves. Anybody who had already knows a little physics knows how waves and frequency work: when you add the same ones together and you have a signal amplified.  Adding contrary ones gives a zero signal. I just realized today how obvious it is to link colour analysis with the theory of amplification in physics.

M: Synchrony >> Synergy = More than the sum of its parts. Interference theory.

You get better at seeing magic when you compare closer and farther over the next few weeks of learning your colours. The closer to the palette, the better. With every shopping expedition, you will compromise less.

 

Reading to Grow Your Soul

Lilia brought this into my world. You will feel closer to who you want to be and how you’re going to get there. From before The Secret took over our co-creation paradigms.

Click on The Game of Life and How to Play It.

If you re-read or remember any part of it because you never heard it said that way,  then donate.

 

Use of Images

The images contained in this article are of private individuals, not celebrities. I consider the permission for me to use them as a privilege. It is my intention to protect these women’s privacy and generosity. If you use any of the photos without permission, I will seek legal counsel. I do not want to have to reduce the beauty and detail of the photographs with watermarks.

This is a learning site. Please do use my words with credit back to the web page you copied and pasted them from. If you mix up my meaning and get the message wrong, feel free to omit any reference back to me.

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How To Match Foundation

October 20, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 12 Comments 

Women bring their own foundation to their colour analysis. One in eight has the best colour choice possible for her skin. Seems apt to talk about it.

The Wrong Hair Colour Merry Go Round

If the hair is too warm the skin is too yellow. You will be matched to too warm a foundation. You will look warmer than you are. Your hair colourist will keep warming up your hair, not noticing that your face is getting yellower, redder, and oilier looking. You will keep applying more makeup. Clothing colours will get more and more out of the loop because you feel something is off and can’t tell what it is. Coping with picking right clothing feels overwhelming.

Solution: Wear your correct clothing colours to go shopping. Tie back your hair with a correct coloured scarf till it can be fixed.

 

The Try-To-Match-My-Eyes Merry Go Round

We do not know our true eye colour simply by looking at it. Uploading the eye photo and extracting the colours can be surprisingly revealing. Likely not one of them will be what you think your eye colour is. The problem here is that you’ve taken your eye out of its context, meaning its surrounding colours in your face and hair. With colour, context is a deal breaker.

Many Light Summers try to match their eye colour in clothing. They can feel that their eye is more than just blue. They can feel that their eye is hazy, not Caribbean ocean clear. They gravitate to Autumn’s teal. That’s more than blue and hazy in its own muted way. On them, this colour looks bigger and darker than they are, like wearing curtains, so they amp up the makeup to match the teal. The young, fresh, sexy appeal of Light Summer evaporates. Dark makeup on light-coloured faces drags everything downward. On everyone, it’s light colour that lifts. Foundation then becomes too warm, dark, and heavy in texture. And on it goes.

Given comparisons, turns out they were close. Their true eye colour is Light Summer turquoise. Not only blue. Hazy. She was so close but got the exact type and amount of heat wrong. How could anybody know unless they were tested in a controlled and correct environment? The apparent similarities are definitely there, but oh what a difference those last little adjustments make in the final image. 10 years on your face or a little more than that.

Often, the Light Summer/Soft Autumn divide isn’t a decision I make till fairly late in the PCA process. Light Summer often wears Soft Autumn warmth in hair, which looks like a heavy hat, like wearing a crochet tea cozy on a shorter-looking person.

Solution: Have thy colours analyzed and take control of thine own appearance. Your Colour Book has your eye colours exactly, all of them.

 

Wait a minute here. Did I just say that your 12 Tone Colour Book based on the 12 colour collections derived by Sci\ART founder Kathryn Kalisz contains every single one of your colours in every person all the time?? Surely not. You’re a golden eyed, medium brown haired Bright Winter. Show  me those in the Bright Winter swatches. As time goes on and I see more, literally and figuratively, I have come to this:

Digression: Every One Of Everyone’s Colours Are In Kathryn’s 12 Tones

I draped a True Winter man. In the Luxury Drapes (Final Drapes), his wife and I could easily see blue and purple colours within the gray of his beard. We have all seen hair so black it’s blue. The brown haired Bright Winter has unique, special hair very unlike Summer medium brown. Someone might call them both medium brown or ash brown. If the hair is on your head and you’ve never stood beside a Summer medium brown and compared, you might think it’s the same. But it’s not. Put Summer’s medium ash brown hair colour on this head and she looks nearer to death.

I have learned the lesson that colours are never what I think they are. What if the swatch books developed by Kathryn, with every colour fully consistent with every other in all 3 dimensions of colour, were 100% right? About every colour in every person, skin, hair, eyes, teeth, veins, the whole deal.

What if we are wrong thinking that a warm brown eye in True Winter is an anomaly? How audacious of us to know better than Nature and a genetic code we barely comprehend. From the track record of getting things right, Nature is out far ahead of humans. She deserves the benefit of the doubt. What if it’s perfectly rational and reasonable that a Light Summer have brown eyes or red hair, even if we can’t see those colours per se in the swatch book? Humans couldn’t explain rain or reproduction not so long ago.

Nature gets everyone 100% consistent. Every feature. No exceptions. Our entire biology is supervised by one genetic code. Every one of your original pigments are in the swatch books. I’d even extend this to include apparent surface colour of the skin, meaning the colour foundation we buy, whether you appear yellow, orange, brown, pink, or white. It’s the mixtures and how they come out in your body that may not be in the swatch books. But I would bet that you could sit down with your swatches as pots of paint and create all your colours just as they appear on your body from those pots of paint. Lots of ways to make the brown of an amber Winter eye. Brown needs three primary colours and Winter has all three. How our eye looks as an amalgamated colour and what pigments participated in the first place are not the same, I’m certain of it.

You literally have thousands of colours in you that could have been in the personal colour analyzed palettes. The Winter amber eye is not like the Soft Autumn or Bright Spring one. Test them with comparisons. I can guarantee that they won’t be identical.

You know that I write this website because I’m trying to figure it all out too. Convince me I’m wrong. Please. All I want is to understand the truth.

 

 

The  “Why that just disappears into your neck” Merry Go Round

Don’t assume the salesperson knows how to match foundation correctly regardless of how slick he/she is about it. She may have gone to a weekend course. She does want you to look great but she has pressures of her own from higher up. She only has her product line to pick from. Mall lighting is the cheapest they can install.

Holding plastic swatches to your face is not enough. Stripes on arms and hands is useless. One stripe on the face and it’s a match – so not good enough. Maybe holding up plastic discs to your skin is acceptable at the drugstore if there are no samples, but at the department store? The nuances of the pigment mixture and the chemistry of our body are just the beginning of the shortcomings of coloured plastic.

Our visual system is comparison based. This is a given. It is how human brain structure is organized. There is no point in fighting it. If you have a hair or eyelash stuck in your mascara wand, do you hold it up against a black wall or a white wall to see it?

You need 4 or 5 stripes on the side of the cheek and jaw. Wait 60 seconds for it to fuse with the skin if it’s going to. Look at it for another 120 seconds and don’t make decisions. Only notice that the longer you look, the more different the stripes become from each other. Now pick the one that’s hardest to see. Can’t tell? Smear them out more on the face.

If you can’t tell if a blouse is your green, go around the store and pick out a few green things. No need for them to be your Season. The hot minute your eye is given a range, it gets busy because it knows how to do comparison. It will position the colour in your perception quite accurately. Staring and thinking and struggling will only take you so far. It’s like forcing a memory. It just goes further away. Give your eye what it wants: comparison. Then your brain says “This, I get. Now I see what you want from me. OK, no problem. Here you go. Here’s your answer.”

Solution: Insist on several stripes. Do the waiting of 60 and 120 seconds. Remove the obvious Nos. Start again. Ask for samples. If it feels like a selling game authority conflict for a single second, run to your nearest Sephora store.

 

Who’s zooming who?

The company is not doing you a favour by offering samples. The markup on this stuff is a zillion million %.  The company’s bosses live in castles. Do not be too grateful.

Think of it like this. You are doing the company a favour by offering them a moment of your attention out of your day. You are doing them an even bigger favour by giving them the willingness to bring their product into your home and to apply it on your body and offer it yet more attention.

They’re going to recover the cost of those samples in their first next sale.

 

Ending On A Happy Note

I have a Dark Winter soul sister who brought her gorgeous daughter to learn what she could look like by choosing certain colours over others. When Cheryl (whom you’ve met before in You Know Your Colours – Now What?) and I met, I felt this reciprocity thing, like I was talking to myself (we do not look alike). A common Dark Winter feeling is “I can tell it like it is or I can waste everyone’s time being all careful.” She and I share it in spades. We laugh about it. She brought me this pack of gum as a gift.

 

 

It was a week ago and I’m still laughing. When I walk the dog, I hope the neighbours don’t drive past and see this lone woman laughing all by herself. I’m typing and laughing. I love my friend, Cheryl.

(The photo is linked to a site with a lot of other funny stuff. You too could be sitting alone in traffic ROTFL.)

 

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The Soft Dramatic Soft Summer Part 2 (and Hair Colour)

September 25, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 16 Comments 

Still lunar and fluid like all Summer, still vaporous, but with a dimensional quality, like a silvery apparition, the hologram we discussed in Part 1. Soft Summer does not have a feeling of steps. What these fairly-light and fairly-dark colours do is flow smoothly.

Paisley asked

“Can the Soft Summer archetype as you model it have a warmer embodiment?…mostly we’re compared to water spirits (which imagery I do love). I wonder if we could have a warmer side that’s maybe more of a mountain spirit? I do have warm-leaning eyes and some warmth in my hair, but yes, the SA drapes turn me yellow. Even so, gold, brass, copper, and rose gold are better on me than silver or pewter, which tend to just sit there on me.”

She makes an important point that applies to many Soft Summer. That warmer incarnation is certainly in my head, but maybe not always in my words and images. Something that comes up often for me is that I see many who are very borderline Soft Summer/Soft Autumn. They’re like the neutralest of the Neutrals, positioned almost even between those two Neutral Seasons. To see the eyes alone, you’ll pick the warmer Season for sure, except that the skin yellows with drapes. On these women, silver (not overly cold and shiny) and gold (not overly yellow and shiny) are about equal.

Soft Summer warms and solidifies significantly relative to True Summer imagery. In my book (over in the right column), we went from a lake to a forest. Hopefully, the Polyvores below portray that.

About shimmer, Paisley said,

As long as the iridescence doesn’t take the color too high, I think iridescent makeup is gorgeous on us. Also your makeup style depends on your Kibbe. Having been identified as a Romantic, I was relieved to read Kibbe’s recommendation that even daytime makeup should have some sparkle. I think very softly glowing making adds to the misty factor, as do finishing powders that are pearlescent. The point being to keep it soft-focus — it’s can’t go toward metallic in any way. But glowing and pearlescent is gorgeous on us, IMO.

And IMO, you’re exactly right, Paisley. I can not say it as well as a woman who lives it.

Seems to me that part of the shimmer, maybe all of it, is explained by the equiluminant property of this palette. Rendered in B&W, it would appear to be just a few shades of grey and much of the detail would disappear. Bring in colour and the combinations are pure melody. Everyone of the 12 Seasons soars depending on what you can do with it. For Soft Summer, it’s in the allure that happens when these colours are worn together on this type of colouring.

Why? Because vision in our brain operates on two parallel tracks. The colour system recognizes faces, objects, and details. The B&W system sees movement, depth, and position.  In equiluminant compositions or outfits, the colorblind B&W track won’t quite be able to tell the location of the elements. But the colour track will see the elements well. This disconnect gives these compositions an unstable, shimmery, unearthly feeling. We talked about it in Part 1. Sorry for repeating, it is so amazing to me.

The SD body has presence. The horizontal shoulder line is substantial and the vertical line equally so. I am not a Kibbexpert, but narrow, petite, or slender wouldn’t be words I’d associate with Soft Dramatic. If someone picked those words for you over Amazonian, I’d have to wonder about another Image Identity. If you look at Images for Raquel Welch, she is luscious-yes, dumpling-no. Compared to other body types, these are a little burly. A lot of size, strength, and length in the upper and lower body.

Kibbe Soft Dramatic (SD)

• broad shoulders, a strong horizontal line
• a long bold sweeping vertical line
• drape, flow, light fabric ; soft plush – so far, great on Soft Summmer
• shiny fabric – for Soft Summer, this looks like the lustre of pearl and abalone shell ; go past it and your colouring will make the fabric shinier than it is and the fabric will make your face more muted

 

 

 

Many Summers ask if they look good in pearls. They absolutely do, taking into account your body’s geometry. Classics wear the classic strand(s) better than one big-huge piece. Dramatic bodies need big and geometric shapes to include the necessary angularity that balances who they already are.

We’ve talked about what looks like black and white on you in Black and White for 12 Seasons. Once you learn to manipulate what you wear to look like B&W or black&red or whatever on you without actually wearing those colours, you have cracked the code. You can achieve any look without ever venturing into unflattering colour by knowing how your own colouring exerts influence over what you wear. How do you do this? Wear your 12 Season Sci\ART palette. Job done.

Mr. K talks about bold and dramatic colour combinations. Great. Use your palette and go wild. Don’t compare your bold and dramatic to how Mr. Spock would get there.

Contrast levels are high here. First, it increases the drama and boldness. Second, I’ve rethought this whole contrast thing – 3! videos coming up about that in another post.

 

 

• Head to Toe.
• T with rounded edges, always the vertical and horizontal lines.
• Luxe and glamour.
• Colour repetition works well to give flow and continue a vertical line.
• Not stiff, tight, shapeless, sharp of drape.
• Lots of length. Strong geometrics with soft edges.
• If you don’t like the muted purples, don’t wear them as clothes. But they make darn good eyeshadow.
• Wear your hair colour on your feet.

 

 

Enlarged the jewelry to be big. With her size and the very generous amount of Yang, jewelry needs to be scaled way up or she’ll dial it down into a dime store trinket.

For the day of the week you go to the office, not the opera, there are shoes here that won’t punish your back and feet. The guys wouldn’t put up with that. Why should we?

 

 

 

Soft Summer Hair Colour

This came up on facebook but this is a good place to insert it. Whatever your Kibbe or Season,

When do highlights in the hair look right? When the distance between the lightest and darkest approximates that in the rest of the colouring (except if you’re a Winter (where contrast rules are unique and addressed in those 3! videos)). That’s how the hair can be a realistic extension of the head.

Summer’s light colours are pastels, more ‘colourful’ than Winter’s icy colours. Also, their darks don’t get extremely dark. So there is not a big distance between the lightest and darkest colours. Soft Summer begins from a darker base colour position than the other Summers. Applying the pastel concept, their highlight will be darker than the other Summers too. Message for colourist: don’t overbleach or add back toners that are too light.

Use a taupe highlight, like medium mushroon, for a tone on tone look. The colour is in your swatches. It is cooler than it is warm. But be careful. Someone sees warmth in the eye and the very neutrality of the skin and overestimates the warmth. Soft Summer is often getting coloured way too light and yellow so the face goes oily and yellow. This is not a butterscotch light, it’s taupe.

Also be careful again. That dusty quality in the hair is essential to bring the roses out of the skin. I mean, essential. Don’t stare at your hair colour and not see the whole like we do. Don’t compare your hair to anyone except other perfect Soft Summer hair, like Princess Kate. Would she look better with saturated hair? No way. Highlights? Absolutely not to me.

Start with a colour a couple of shades lighter than the base, usually a medium ash brown And be careful once again. Chemical colour is often very saturated and looks darker than expected, like saturated cosmetics do. So you might even go a few shades lighter than the base to compensate.

If you can keep 80% of the hair as totally unprocessed, much better to give the skin harmony and perfecting potential that chemistry so skillfully removes with chemical pigments. Make highlights filaments, not chunks.

How about this?  Look at the before. Cooler than warm but not pure ash cool silvery brown. The highlights on the right side of your screen (not the model) are pretty good in the lower half of the hair. On the other side, the eye can get caught up on the too-light strands. Soft Summer’s total expression is Summer colours in shade. Still, those too light strands are at least cool beige, not platinum, not yellow or orange. The base is pretty darn good for a Soft Summer. I like it. (IDK if this model is a Soft Summer, it’s just about the hair).

 

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The Soft Dramatic Soft Summer Part 1

September 18, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments 

Appearance

The body types being referred to below come from David Kibbe’s excellent book on the subject, Metamorphosis (1987). For me this is the book that works, IF you can find yourself. It’s harder than you’d think. I am asked to offer it as part of PCA appts, which I’d gladly do if it could be objectified. As long as it’s just my opinion or Mr. Kibbe calls me to train with him, the client won’t get her ROI (return on investment).

 

Searching for the Soft Dramatic Body

She has a lush, exotic quality to her features. Angelina Jolie? Maybe if her head were on Sharon Stone’s body. This is where it becomes anyone’s opinion, but to me, her body is too small and compact, her expression is very open and giving and the features are too Yin. She’s not physcially big enough to embody Diva. Height does matter somewhat. This is an imposing physical presence that seems bigger than it is at any height. An SD woman commands her space.

If Phyllisha Rashad is Dramatic Classic (DC), SD is more physically Yang than that. Even a DC could drown in all the fabric draping of SD, or look that way even with the draping scaled down to her size, as if she’s wearing curtains.

I wonder if IRL, Angelina’s proportions would have that Hollywood quality of large head/small body that photograpshs well. JAniston has that too. Whitney Houston would be very close to SD and often dressed that way.

SD and Flamboyant Natural (FN) are close in my head. What separates them is the FN’s ability to still wear sweats and eat popcorn. The SD is not nearly as accessible or approachable. She has a more formal energy all the time. She doesn’t own sweats and can barely force herself into yoga wear, but she’s easy to imagine with a tennis racket, on a skateboard, running on the beach at 6am without makeup. Movement is key for the Naturals.

Naomi Campbell? Perhaps, but she seems very slender.

Linda Evangelista? Very possible.

Someone smart suggested Kate Winslet as a Soft Dramatic (and very possibly Soft Summer). That’s a great choice. Big body. Lush, large features with a lot of overall Yang energy, too much to assign her curviness to the Romantic or Soft Classic group.

Visual Processing and The Soft Summer Palette

Neurochemical information travels millions of pathways from retina to various centers in the brain. That’s just the beginning of how an image forms. Neuropsychology kicks in and modifies the retinal data to adjust for lighting, experience, and assumptions as the brain strives to make sense of what it sees, and of course, of surrounding colours.

We appreciate that seasonal or 12 Season colour analysis is based on simultaneous contrast, the fact that two colours side-by-side change one another in our perception.  Soft Summer is a most spectacular Season but we can too easily focus on “those colours are dull” instead of what that very ‘dullness’ makes them capable of that no other can do.

For all three Summers, the ability of adjacent versions of the same hue but differing values to appear 3D, to advance and recede, is central to (my) understanding (of) those Seasons. On Summer colouring, monochromatic colour schemes lose their flatness and give the illusion of a rounded, touchable image. Why the Summers? Because they’re cool-colour (blue-based) colours, so when their value is made darker by adding dark grey or black, they remain blue and they do so across the light/dark band. They don’t turn green or purple.  This works especially well with the True and Soft whose colours are muted, which our brains interpret as ‘far’, establishing a depth relationship.

 

Because of how edges are discerned at the level of the retina, we have more difficulty understanding edges. Monochromatics are even more challenging for discerning edges. They seem to move. They come and go and float around. With even the slight influence of Autumn in this Neutral Season Soft Summer colour collection, this 3D effect from contiguous monochromatics moves to a whole new level.

Over the Autumn palette’s span, which has influence in five different groups of natural colouring, the theme is dimensionality. It’s been called texture, strength, rope, weave, all expressing a similar notion of how this colour language speaks most clearly. Soft Summer steps up from the early 3D effect above that works so well on True Summer, to the phenomenon of the hologram. Still shimmery, more 3D.

 

With no good evidence, I’ve always seen the Soft Summer composition as lost edges, a figment of the imagination, impressions of depth that might just be apparitions, uncertainty about what is real, like the ghosts of shapes that move in and out of each other, whispered suggestion, signals you’re not sure you heard or saw, phantoms moving in and out of your perception.  The colours made sense tome that way. Finally someone smarter than I am explained it to me: equiluminance.

Luminance means the intensity of emitted light from a surface. That’s not exactly the same as light/dark levels or value because the trunk of a birch tree in shade and one of its leaves in sun may emit similar light at that moment, but in some ways, our brain sees luminance as value. Equiluminance means equal value or light/dark level.

The brain uses its luminance pathways (gray scale, black to white, value) to inform us about position (Where). The chromatic pathways (colour) tells us what things are, their forms and shapes (What). Take away colour and we can’t discern what things are quite as well.

Without colour, the painting looks 2D by the loss of detail in depth. The examples above come from this great website where you’ll find many more great examples.

When colour transitions are gradual because they are of similar value, our colour perceptive brain pathways (or chromatic pathways) are activated but our luminance pathways are not. We feel a little unsure of shape, position, and motion. We have trouble placing forms and objects. In Soft Summer, where saturation is low and values are medium, the colour combinations are exquisite to the point of being supernatural because shapes seem less stable.

The Sci\ART palettes make all this that I talk about happen automatically. Those palettes put these visions in my head, not the other way around. You don’t have to do much other than wear your colours.

 

Apparel in Part 2. Next article, I promise.

 

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What Do You Want From Your Colour Analysis?

August 22, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 5 Comments 

What three things do you want to be different after? Does one matter most?

How much time to that outcome would be acceptable to you or do you expect to need?

How will you know that you’re on the right track?

These are what I’m thinking about today.

Creating Your Best PCA

In his great book, Creating, Robert Fritz (linked to his site, look around, he’s extremely good, find Creating under Books)…he describes creating (not creativity or creating but actually making something new, like your better appearance for instance) as having essential components, all of which we must define to bring any creation to reality. Without pulling together a strong intention and/or vision about the following three points, it’s just drifting.

#1 is a defined start point. Most of us are so busy with process, i.e. spending and more spending, that we forgot to assess current reality and know where the Start line is. Are we Dark? Warm? Neutral and Classic or Neutral and Lush? You, your daughter, and your friend don’t set out from the same place.

 #2 is knowing how you plan to measure success, meaning how you will recognize that you made the creation that you set out to make – would taking over control of your hair colour qualify? That’s a measurable goal.

 #3, #4, #5, the book is full of brilliant, basic, and overlooked points. The last one is: what is the desired outcome? To own one more blush and bring the total to 12? To have hair that looks like it could have happened on its own? Analysts argue about how many Seasons. 4, 12, 16, or more. Who cares?  It’s the wrong argument because it’s debating an outcome that the user of the system doesn’t really care about because they don’t need to. The number doesn’t matter as long as there is a precise means of integrating the relevant palettes. It’s like discussing whether Seasons is an outdated term to classify natural colouring groups. Whatever, we can call them NC 1 – 12 if it sounds better.

Most certainly, precision matters behind the scenes, which is why the Sci\ART method holds such a high standard. Without it, we’re lost. That’s how these most effective palettes came to be in the first place. But the industry shouldn’t stop there. If the theory disappeared, it would have less impact on the consumer than if she could no longer get her youngest hair colour. Like if mechanical engineering fell through the floor, it wouldn’t matter till the car stopped moving. Value that the consumer clearly feels is the point. The real Q that should be getting asked and answered is, did the analysis process and Colour Book come with enough follow-through to help you use your colours to choose lipstick that looks superb on your face?

 

 

If you looked at me and thought “Wow, does she always look this tired?”, it’s because I was chasing a bat around my house at 2.30 am. I got it into the room where Bill was sleeping and shut the door, figuring I’d deal with it in the morning. Nothing wakes him up. I go back to bed. At 3 am, I worry that the bat is rabid and if it lands on him and he swats at it and it bites him…how was I going to explain that to the newspaper? Me, a vet and all, it wouldn’t sound very good. By 4 am, the bat is dealt with, locked in a room with Bill whom I forced to wake up, oh, so happy. The digression that always inserts itself somewhere.

One more digression…it took about 4 minutes to upload these videos to YouTube!! It used to take an hour. And PhotoBooth does the recording on the computer. Maybe we’ll do a lot more videos.

A smart marketer, one who can see the blanks down the road, will make -

>> an App that scans the internet for a woman’s colour palette in retail (thank you to Betty who came up with this)

>> a full palette of solid powder makeup for each of the 12 Seasons to travel with (thank you to Christine for the suggestion and for knowing that her needs are the same as every woman’s)

This is the stuff women want. That tagline up at the top of the page that says “Know your perfect colours.” Who cares? Not our client, and she is the only person that someone in any business should be focused on. I’ll change it once I come up with a better business name. 3 years now and it still hasn’t come to me.

PCA Training

Why do I want to know?

By the end of this year, I hope to be teaching students to see what I see when I analyze human colouring. It will use the Sci\ART method developed by Kathryn Kalisz because the more I use it, the more I believe that it’s the one that works. The course content will vary a lot from my own Sci\ART training to reflect differences in process, interpretation, and use that I’ve acquired along the way.

I was never certified as a trainer. I am not a colour theorist. I’m using a method I didn’t invent, but that’s fair. Ideas can’t be patented. Math teachers didn’t invent math. Credit will go back to the source in various forms. I’ve been asked if I will certify people after…Well, sure, for what it’s worth. Nobody certified the one signing your certificate here. I can promise you an Analyst Training Guide with breakdowns, flow charts, scripts, standards, troubleshooting, process, psychological and emotional support issues that arise, and much more. You will have confidence and competence once we’re done.

I want students to know how to interpret natural colouring and provide the client with the greatest advantage in using their colours for everyday buy decisions. To do that better, I am asking you, our very precious clients, to think about what it is you really want from your best colours and send it to me privately to christine@12blueprints.com. The more you can distill the answer to a few key points, the better. I’ll listen to every story. I will share your information, anonymously only, you have my promise, with students to help them understand how to serve you better. Tell us what you want. Hair colour charts?  Garment examples? Newsletters? New makeup collections swatched?

Help us take the work out of your hands. What an analyst can do in an hour could take you a month. We just need to know what you want. More emphasis on certain parts of the analysis?  Less time draping, more time on makeup? If you’ve had it done, what aspect of shopping was hard and how could it have been easier? The whites are always a challenge…what about 12 pieces of white fabric for each Season (not just yours) to shop with? Use the ingenuity that I know you have and think like that, OK?

As an update, many have asked for training and it’s time to stop putting them off. This service changes the lives of women and men forever and it needs to be shared on a broad scale. The biggest reason for delay has been providing drapes to students so they can practice on everyone they know the day they finish the course. I hope that drapes and the course will both be for sale by the end of this year. Know that many of us are working towards that end. The course, I could get you next month. The drapes, the biggest and most critical job of them all, that’s going to need a little more time and attention, but it is moving forward.

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Read the letter from Amber on the Testimonials page (it’s the 23rd one). What I love most is that when women leave, for this one moment, they are truly happy to have the body and face they have. To appreciate, love, and be thankful for the face and body you were given, what a place to get to.  Any feeling that you felt once, you can get back to. Bringing you there that first time is why I do this.

To the same degree, I will extend myself for my student in whatever way he/she values. The opportunity to earn a good living must be within reach so that every woman has an colour analyst within a few hours’ drive of her hometown. Therefore, in part to get me out of the way so students can gain experience, the fee for an analysis with me will increase to $300 as of Nov. 1/12. What you can expect for your investment and how you will be improved are addressed in #1 on the PCA FAQs page.

 

The second video is also about value as well, a different perspective.

 

 

More numbers: You’ll save the cost of the colour analysis appointment 2 to 10 times over in the first year alone, assuming you spend $600 to $3000 yearly on appearance, not including non-colour items like facials. Yes, you’re still spending, but way smarter, returning little, and giving away almost never. Over a lifetime, the payback is extreme. Sooner you know, sooner you save.

Ultimately, my goal is to make you the expert on your own appearance. You’ve been in stores. You know that nobody else can do that like you can. Appearance is not just Rules. Your answers are not all in one book, method, technique, or advisor. It’s Colour + Layer gleaned from Kibbe + Layer that felt right from Dressing Your Truth and other sources + Character + Individual beyond rules + Context + Objective feedback.

Scroll back to the top and take a little time to consider the questions there. If you’ll tell me what you hope your PCA will tell you or give you, I’ll look after making that happen.

 

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Black and White for 12 Seasons

June 26, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 17 Comments 

A reminder that I will not be shipping the book, Return to Your Natural Colours, in the month of July. If you’re in the US, Kerry at Indigo Tones may have some copies. Otherwise, best to wait till August.

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Women often say that they want to wear bright, vibrant colour. On most types of colouring, that kind of colour is the only thing others will see, hear, feel, or remember. The right lipstick for your natural colouring will look plenty bright to the rest of us who look at you. We don’t look at your clothes on a hanger or your makeup on a sheet of paper. Your right colours in hair and clothes look just as vibrant ON YOU as truly vivid colours look on those women where they have a natural presence.

Only the True Winter wears pitch black and stark white and looks complete. Pure black and pure white do appear in all 3 Winter palettes, but my eye prefers the Dark and Bright  in B&W if they also wear one of their ‘colour colours’ as an accent somewhere in the ensemble. They could do fine in B&W alone if their natural colouring is very close to that of TW. As a Dark Winter, I don’t wear B&W. I can’t meet the coldness and the sharpness.

Not everyone can be invited to every party and nor would they want to be. Would we rather stand in a room full of strangers or friends? There will be some combination of near white and near black that will look like B&W on you. That’s the whole thing, to get the optical effect of B&W on your natural colouring. Wearing pitch black when it isn’t in the natural colouring looks like wearing sweat pants because it can’t find focus or definition. The viewer has an impression of a bulky blur. Besides, it matches nothing else in the wardrobe.

Stores won’t supply 12 great ‘blacks’. Just practicing the basics for that True Season trio will help more than you can imagine.

Look at the graphics below in natural lighting without sunlight. Play with the tilt of your screen to see the colour’s versions. Don’t go shopping from these colours. Use your Colour Book of personal swatches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Spring True: Buttery cream and a grey so yellow it looks brown. At this degree of skin warmth, pure white doesn’t look any better than on the Autumns.

Light: Raw cauliflower white. There is a Brazil nut brown that goes darker than the grey above, but I’m trying to keep obvious ROYGBIV out of this.

Bright: As good as it is on Bright Winter, absolute white is far from the best on this colouring, causing the skin tone and eyes to grey and fatigue, especially worn in a large block. White looks good and adds crispness if the area is kept small and mixed in with warmer, brighter colour to keep the eye moving. The better white is very light, a white that is greyed and yellowed at once. The ‘black’ isn’t black but a dark, clean grey, not earthy or blued. Bright Spring can often manage dense black in small areas, not right under the chin.

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Summer True: This trip through Photoshop taught me that if I pick the undertone of the skin (see them in RTYNC, the book pictured in the right column, they’re not on this website), adjust the saturation as appropriate for the Season, and select the lightest colour possible, I get the Season’s ‘white’. True Summer’s began as clean cobalt type blue and moderate saturation.  Many with darker hair tones could go darker in their ‘black’ above, but not too dark. The colour above hopefully represents everyone, knowing that darker tones are available once colour pigments like blue, green, red, and so on, are added.

 Light: Vanilla ice cream. There is a grey that goes darker than what’s shown but it is more blue-looking than this grey.

Soft: Campfire smoke. And smoke blocks light, so the whole palette is a little smoked, muting colours. Smoke also reduces transparency. Earrings (like these) made of glass smoked with your palette colours are simply beautiful. Medium pewter makes a great black.

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Autumn True: What applies to pants and boots applies to anything where we default to black. Diorshow Brown mascara is a very close match.

Soft: Light putty. This Season also has medium and dark putty. Compared to Spring, greys are more orange and somehow greener – which makes sense since green is made of blue (Summer) and yellow (added as gold since this is Autumn). Summer’s greys are bluer.

Dark: like the pages of an airport paperback. Books aren’t truly B&W, that’s too hard to read, especially on a screen where it seems to twinkle. But our brains, that are adjusting colours all day long and telling us they’re white, do the same to the pages of a book.

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Winter True: Snow so white, it looks a little blue next to any other white. And black.

Bright: Polar bear, maybe with the slightest yellow peach tint… polar bear at sunrise. Adding that my eye loves Bright Winter in crisp white even better than black. For me, these are the ultimate wearers of pure white. And black.

Dark: One drop of tar fell in the white paint pot, but barely a trace. You don’t know it’s not pure white unless you hold it next to pure white and even then you’re not sure. And like all Winter’s icy lights, this is mostly white with barely a trace of pigment, nowhere near as softly grayed as Summer’s white. So, white can be icy or pastel too, an interesting concept to roll around. Enough of my talking, think about the center of an Oreo cookie before you separate the halves and light shines on the white. Look at Merle Norman’s Ice, best eyeshadow highlight for the Season that I know and we can move on.

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Like an alphabet that makes sense out of sounds so they can be used and shared, the 12 Season (12 Tone) Sci\ART palettes make sense out of colours. Then, it’s up to you to write the poem, the song, the story. It’s up to you to make your house a home.

 

 

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Are Seasons The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems?

June 22, 2012 by Christine Scaman · 8 Comments 

Rephrase

Seasons are NOT The Same Between Colour Analysis Systems

Many are asking this Q in different formats lately. Here’s my take on the A.

 

 

What should I do if System A said I was Dark Autumn and System B says Soft Autumn?

Pick the one you trust the most because they’re not the same. Choosing is easier if you could see what the analyst was seeing. It’s much harder, maybe impossible, if you couldn’t. This is partly why we so much want YOU to see it.

If you decide that System A resonated best with you, then stick with their products. Whatever they call the Season, if those were your most harmonizing colours, then stay with those colours. Buy their swatch book and hope it repeats the colours of their drapes very faithfully. Don’t be analyzed by A’s drapes and buy B’s Colour Book, it may not contain the same colours. In fact, you should assume that it will not contain the same colours. Stay with A’s makeup recommendations too because those are calibrated to go with the palettes of the individual system.

I cannot over-emphasize to what degree the whole result and outcome and every decision you make thereafter hinges on those drapes, and they in turn on how exact the palettes themselves are.

Neither analysts nor clients can succeed with drapes from one system, the swatches from another, and the makeup recs from a third. Every little difference gets magnified to become big differences when you’re choosing lipstick.

 

 

What are the differences between PCA Systems’ drapes? How can one company’s True Autumn be so different from another’s?

I don’t know what other PCA companies’ drapes look like. I’ve never seen their original colours other than in books. If you can be analyzed in one system and can get the colours from another system to fit into the result, you’re lucky. Some can, usually in the True Seasons, but for some it’s just a colour-by-colour minefield.

What if System Y’s Light Summer drapes, or even just a few of their Light Summer drapes, were actually found in Sci\ART’s Light Spring collection? I think this is probably what really happens. Not my place to say wrong or right, but if you try the makeup for Light Summer suggested by Sci\ART analysts, you will feel uncomfortable.

Why the differences in the first place? Because it happens in every industry that’s unregulated and many that are. Initial philosophies, theoretical basis of the colour groups, desired endpoint, working  materials, all different.

 

 

Lorraine, who asks the Q below, has always felt close to Soft Summer but couldn’t get the Season to fit just right. She lives too far from a Sci\ART analyst and has done some figuring on her own. She says,

‘I was really lost…until I read the theory of 16 Seasons. I recognized myself in the season ”soft deep winter” on this website (http://www.coloressential.net/2012/04/and-12-seasons-became-16.html) They say that Ginnifer Goodwin is soft deep winter and I find the comparison with Penelope Cruz quite good. [My friend] and me (dark winter VS soft dark winter) can wear the same colors, with some exceptions.”

Those Colour Books were most interesting on that website. They look similar to True Colour Australia’s in design, and it’s a very usable design, but the colours are not the same for the closest Sci/ART 12 Tone (or TCA 12 Tone) I can match it to, which is Light Spring. I couldn’t enlarge the photo so maybe I’m way off. Here is a perfect example of being draped or otherwise identified as Light Spring but another company’s Light Spring swatches won’t be the same, leaving you questioning and dissatisfied when it’s time to use them.

And always, the question remains of what one analyst sees as harmony, or you at your best, while another analyst wouldn’t feel the same way. One person might see Natalie Portman as a Dark Winter, while another feels that palette is too cool and has reasons to prefer Dark Autumn. I’m undecided about her Season.

To Lorraine’s Season conclusion: Very colour perceptive, this is a woman who is probably seeing the right things as much as anyone could. It’s hard to analyze yourself, like giving yourself a really complicated haircut. Yes, a darker Soft Summer could be a ‘Soft Deep Winter’ in some ways. The Seasons share many similarities. Both begin fully cool and add one step of Autumn’s type of heat. The upper end of S Su’s darkness could be the lower end of DW’s.

Now what? How is the palette called “Soft Deep Winter” assembled? Does it borrow from S Su and DW? And whose version of S Su and DW is it borrowing from, because they’re not all the same? Does it use Color Me Beautiful’s Deep Winter and just drop the saturation of every colour? Does it offer up new colours that didn’t exist before in either parent palette, which that would really be the best, so that each Season is distinct from every other? Are the palettes even based in deliberate scientific measurement of colour dimension for all 760 colours (hue, value, saturation (chroma)) or were they eyeballed from a Pantone catalog?

I don’t know the answers here. These are just the Q the consumer should ask herself. Let’s be real and admit that the consumer can’t be expected to sort through all the dialects out there. I’m just trying to move the logic one step further, beyond the theory and into the store. For most consumers, the colour theory discussions sounds like PCA companies are saying the same thing using different words. Sometimes we are, sometimes not at all. The comparison is as hard to judge correctly as it is to know what’s going on behind the scenes in two different hospitals.

The point is this: will the consumer be enabled to make right or wrong shopping decisions? That’s the only layer of data she wants or needs.

There is room for everyone. What I’m saying is to pick a company and stick with it. Don’t put Dell parts in your iMac and wonder why it won’t turn on.

 

And, Lorraine also said,

 I know you are a ‘deep winter’, have you ever thought about being a ‘soft winter deep’? I always thought your colors seemed a little bit hard on you (but very good too… a little like me in dark winter colors) so I don’t know, I am simply asking !

And I agree with that too and think Lorraine has a very discerning eye. I also have big respect for her, that she felt she could voice that truth, taking the risk that she’d be held emotionally accountable. We train others in how to treat us, what lines not to cross, where to tiptoe, the result being that few of us ever hear other people’s truths about us – so I thank you, Lorraine, for taking the risk.

Darkness matters most to Dark Winter, while the saturation and heat of each colour can move up or down a little. (What’s a little supposed to mean? It means all 3 colour dimensions for each Season are fairly tight before the harmony and flattering effect you want is compromised or lost, not just the most important dimension (TMIT). So you need to hope that whoever put your colours together knew about a little.) Many colours between 760 colours of the 12 Tones/Seasons appear very close when compared side by side. What makes them finally belong among the others of their Season IS the others, the harmony they achieve together. Did every colour from another system’s swatch books get measured in terms of its value, hue, and chroma? I have no idea. I know that Sci\ART’s did so I stick with it.

Lorraine’s point is very valid. I own 3 colour Books from 3 companies, to fine tune my knowledge of my colour space. I don’t look as dark as Penelope Cruz. But I can make S Su lipsticks disappear entirely to gray unless the colour is at the high end of S Su darkness (since S Su sat must stay low) and at the low end of DW saturation, as Mercier Dry Rose. It’s not the name of the Season that matters, it’s the colours in it. Lorraine is right that I look too sharp in over-saturated colour. I wear a layer of Lauder Double Wear Mauve under lipstick to keep it in place, and lighten and desaturate  the colour a little, without getting anywhere near S Su.

You know, maybe wearing too much colour is my obnoxious side wanting to be heard, and believe me when I tell you that it exists. I don’t know what I look like any more than anyone else does. I don’t look at me all day long, others do. I probably dress beyond my best saturation edge now and again. I go beyond my truth borders in what I say at times too. If I can’t decide what I think about something, I’ll try saying it and feeling whether I can align with it. Makes me say quite a lot that I don’t believe, a lot that exaggerates my beliefs, makes me sound more absolute and abrupt than I am. So, overdoing it with colour is a way of dressing that feels very congruent with how I behave.

I’m not really looking for perfect hair colour. I’m looking for how to explore my highest self and potential and translate that into the language of appearance, a powerful and universal human communication about a whole lot besides wealth. All that happens outside of us is happening inside. If wearing different jewelry makes me behave differently, then can I use that to approach the person I want to be? Yes, as it turns out, I can. That’s change from the outside in. Change can also happen from the inside out – which is why I barely advertise my services. The woman whose colours I love to uncover finds me when the time is right. She is at a crossroads in her life. She knows the past doesn’t hold her answers and she is receptive to the many wheres and hows through which her true path might find her. I get clients that I adore and that teach me more than I could return. That I have had to grow into my clients has been a privilege I cannot describe.

The world is simply our mirror. What we see is exactly what we are sending out there. I use colour to speak truth. Not everyone will or should or cares.

 

 

Under the article about the very lovely swatch plumes at Indigo Tones, Denise asks how I shop with  more than one Colour Book.

This is a woman by woman decision. Some will find it a confusion. Without a doubt, you have to begin with one accurate Book. You might use only that one for the first year, like I did. Which one to buy is a conversation to have with your analyst. If using your palette best for you means sticking tight to one set of colours forever, then that is exactly what you should do. I don’t want you wearing less colour, safe colour, unflattering colour, or wasting money for one more moment of your life.

I went shopping. Lo and behold, stores didn’t hand me my 60 colours. Well, after a PCA, the freedom of knowing what to never look at again is nearly euphoric. You are in the mood to shop! So, you buy things that look about right because, by all the gods, you’re not going home empty-handed. What you pay attention to gets bigger (like black on light people ) The colours of our world suddenly exist in relation to you, a feeling you go after like a high. It takes on three dimensions, maybe four, maybe more. You want to be in stores and play with your new skill set.

But stores, ay…vendors are suspicious and negative, and not without some reason to be. Women get so literal about the interpretation. This is partly why it fell apart back in the 80s. I don’t want that to happen again so we need a new way for consumers to use their palettes, not meaning allowing wrong colour but simply knowing when it’s safe to relax a little. Also, if you know me from visiting here, I’m very rigid about technique and standards for identifying colours, more so every day, because I’ve seen it go wrong too many times and how easily that can happen. On the other hand, I work at being really fluid and plastic about how we use colour in our lives.

My Colour Books are three interpretations of Kathryn Kalisz’s original Sci\ART 12 Tone palettes, some near identical and some quite arguably outside the borders – which helped define the borders. That exercise has value to a colour analyst, but not necessarily to a consumer. Most people have no reason to own wrong colours. If you want to become a student of colour analysis, exposing yourself to many opinions, inside and outside Sci\ART, is necessary to know where your position will be and why.

The various Books open my mind to new voices about myself. The more voices we listen to, the better our understanding of any topic. Not saying I purchase every colour in every Book, not at all. After a year with the original Sci\ART palette, I knew the limits of my colour dimensions (hue, value, chroma) and you will too. You really will feel your way into it, as many women will attest. You’ll also define and refine your personal taste. Doors upon doors will open.

As usual, it takes me four paragraphs to get to answering the question. How do I shop with three Books? The same way others shop with one. By comparing colours to swatches. By gathering several items of similar colour to the one I’m considering, doesn’t matter if in my Season or not, and comparing to swatches. Colour is so dependent on what surrounds it that we never really know what a colour is without comparisons. And then, how we see it will shift between one comparison and the next. The more comparisons I make, the better I get what colour I’m really looking at. I don’t bring out all 3 Books in stores. I do the comparing at home. I have always learned something from it.

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{All photography: Sonja Mason}

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A reminder that I will not be shipping the book, Return to Your Natural Colours, in the month of July. If you’re in the US, Kerry at Indigo Tones may have some copies. Otherwise, best to wait till August.

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Next Page »

• ***COLOUR TRAVELS***

  Nikki Bogardus of My Color Rx will be in:

  -London, England, June 10-14, 2013.
  -Boston, Mass., Date TBA, September-October - If interested, please email Nikki from her website just below.

  More information about Nikki's sessions and Contact details to book appts. can be had by emailing from her website at www.mycolorrx.com
  =========================

  Christine will be in:

  -London, ON ! Last visit before October !, June 7, 8, 9, 10.
  -London, ON, October 18-21, 2013

  Please email to christine@12blueprints.com for scheduling. Answers to common questions are linked in the upper crossbars on this page under PCA FAQs.
  ---------------------------------------------

• ***PCA TRAINING COURSE***

  Dates for the course to become certified as 12 Blueprints Personal Colour Analyst trained by Christine Scaman, are as follows:

  -Chatham ONTARIO, May 27, 28, 29, 2013. [FULL]
  -Chatham, ON June 18, 19, 20. [FULL]
  -Chatham ON, August 20, 21, 22, 2013. [FULL]
  - Chatham, ON, September 9, 10, 11, 2013. [FULL]
  -Chatham, ON, September 30, October 1, 2. [1 SPOT LEFT]
  -Chatham, ON, October 28, 29, 30.
  -Chatham, ON, November 25, 26, 27. [FULL]

  Space is limited to 2 students per session.

  Deposits are accepted and the course package mailed 6 weeks in advance.

  The Complete Collection of 108 Test Drapes will be available within 4-6 weeks of completion of the course for students only. More info in the article linked two lines down.

  More about schedules, content, drapes, and looking ahead to 2014 at http://12blueprints.com/the-pca-training-course/

  Please email me at christine@12blueprints.com with inquiries, to request an additional session, or to reserve a place.

  --------------------------------------------------

• We are most beautiful when the colours we wear are in perfect harmony with the colours we are.

  

  Learn how your natural colouring can guide you to your most flattering clothing, makeup, and hair colour choices. It works every time, for every item, on everybody.

  12 Seasons of practical, affordable information on the styles, cosmetics, hair colour, and jewelry that each palette wears most beautifully and the comparisons you need to wear your Season perfectly!

  Click here for Book Details and Buy Info.

• Recent Posts

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  • Introducing Sci\ART Colour Analyst and Trainer Terry Wildfong
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  • Protected: For Training Course Graduates: Self-Test and Review
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• Recent Comments

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• Categories

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